Excel-Killer Startup Anaplan Just Raised $100 Million On A $1 Billion+ Valuation

Tuesday

May 13, 2014 at 1:02 PM

Julie Bort

Things are going exceptionally well for Anaplan these days, the startup that's taking on Excel with a cloud app.

The company just closed a $100 million series D investment, led by VC DFJ Growth. That brings the total it's raised to $150 million.

The company is now valued at over $1 billion, a source close to the company tells us.

Human resources cloud company Workday was one of the investors in the round, as was Salesforce.com, which had invested in an earlier round, too. That means that Anaplan is backed by two of the most respected cloud companies in the nation.

Workday is led by co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, who is also a high-powered VC at Greylock Ventures, where he has invested in, and is a board member of, one of Anaplan's major competitors, Tidemark.

The big raise might not be too shocking to anyone that has been following this market.

As we previously reported, Anaplan went from generating about $10 million in all of 2012, to $10 million per quarter in 2013. And it hit $10 million per month as of January, 2014, it told Business Insider.

The company is trying to get people who run their businesses with spreadsheets to make the leap to the cloud. It offers a sophisticated financial planning and modeling tool that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, but also does things Excel can't do, like letting groups work together.

Founded about eight years ago, it really started to flourish after it hired CEO Frederic Laluyaux, who came from SAP.

Laluyaux said the Workday investment happened because both companies share a lot of customers. They were working to make their cloud products work better together when "Workday learned that we were doing our D round" he said.

Laluyaux is happy to have Workday aboard. "Aneel's support and strong positive views on Anaplan are a testament that Anaplan is really on the right path," he said.

"Anaplan is addressing a very large market opportunity," Glein told us. "The company has the wind at its back and is scaling rapidly, thinking big about the future."

Next up, Anaplan wants to entice third-party developers to create pre-packaged modules for its app. It also wants to let them tap into its cloud to add graphs and modeling to their own apps, Glein told us.

See Also:

Marc Andreessen Gets All The Credit For Inventing The Browser But This Is The Guy Who Did 'All The Hard Programming'In Two Years, This Excel-Killing Startup Grew Sales From $10 Million A Year To $10 Million A MonthSources: The Inside Story Of Why SAP's Star Engineer Vishal Sikka Suddenly Left The Company

SEE ALSO: Why Startup Founders Happily Give Up 90% Of Their Companies

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